“Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences”: Open Access Book by Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald published today

Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences, co-authored by Felicity Callard (Director of Hubbub; Reader in Social Science for Medical Humanities at the Department of Geography and Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University) and Des Fitzgerald (Lecturer in Sociology, Cardiff University; Hubbub collaborator) offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Setting itself against standard accounts of interdisciplinary ‘integration,’ and rooting itself in the authors’ own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines.

Rethinking Interdisciplinarity does not merely advocate interdisciplinary research, but attends to the hitherto tacit pragmatics, affects, power dynamics, and spatial logics in which that research is enfolded. Understanding the complex relationships between brains, minds, and environments requires a delicate, playful and genuinely experimental interdisciplinarity, and this book shows us how it can be done.

Meeting People is Easy: The Pragmatics of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

“Which Way Does It Go Between You Two?”: Modes of Interdisciplinary Intervention

Environmental Entanglements: Neurological Lives and Social Worlds

States of Rest: Interdisciplinary Experiments

Choreographing the Interdisciplinary

Against Reciprocity: Dynamics of Power in Interdisciplinary Spaces

Feeling Fuzzy: The Emotional Life of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

– Epilogue

This book is published by Palgrave Macmillan within its innovative Pivot format — which allows authors to publish at lengths of between 25,000 and 50,000 words and to take advantage of a swift and flexible publication process that dramatically reduces publication times. The book is published open access under a CC-BY license and is funded by The Wellcome Trust in the context of the Hubbub grant.

Felicity and Des will be discussing “Rethinking Interdisciplinarity”, Open Access, and cross-disciplinary academic publishing at Wellcome Collection on 13 November at “The Changing Face of Academic Research and Publishing: Creating a Dialogue around the Book (London)”. You can book a free place here.

Felicity and Des warmly welcome your thoughts on and reactions to the book. They are also very grateful to many from Hubbub who commented on drafts of the book, and whose work in collaboration with both authors have been central to the book’s development.